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Articles By: Ed HumesEdward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of twelve nonfiction books, the latest being Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash. Humes' recent trilogy of environmental books also includes Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet and Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart's Green Revolution. His other books tell stories of crime, juvenile justice, education, science, and medicine. No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court received a PEN Award for nonfiction, and Humes' definitive account of a modern-day Scopes Trial, Monkey Girl, received Silver Gavel honors for its depiction of America's evolution wars. He received his Pulitzer for his newspaper coverage of the military. He has taught writing, journalism, and literary nonfiction at graduate and undergraduate levels, and he has written for the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Sierra Magazine, and Los Angeles Magazine. He lives in Southern California.

The head of a plastic bag industry group, whose full-time job consists of battling local bans on disposable grocery sacks, made a provocative observation to me about trash recently: Don’t be so quick to reject waste, he warned. “Zero waste would mean a zero economy.” Equating green with economic ruin is a familiar refrain, of course, but this claim about [&hellip